Let's talk about Bipolar for a minute....

Carrie Fisher was bipolar, and once said that she did drugs because "drugs made me feel normal". Speaking as a bipolar myself, I'd like to argue that a bipolar has no accurate conception of what constitutes "normal". The peculiarities of our apparently defective genome that result in us having this bipolar disorder also render our judgement unreliable, especially during severe episodes of the characteristic mood-swings.

"Normal" is therefore not only a very subjective condition, but also completely dependent upon one's past experience, which, in our case, according to all recognized medical authorities, is NOT "normal". What's "normal" for a manic depressive is generally considered to be "abnormal" for the general populace, otherwise it wouldn't be identified as a "problem". So my "normal" is not yours. Yours is familiar to me from observation & interactions with you so-called "normals", and I'm aware of what's expected in a "normal's" conduct. (Not all of you are as "normal" as you think!) But your "normal" feels weird to me. When I'm properly medicated to make me behave like a "normal", I feel like a zombie. People I have worked with have also said so. In fact, they are the ones that brought it to my attention.

My lady friend of 39 years, also a bipolar, asked "Would you rather be normal?" I replied, "Darling, for you and I, the way we are is normal." And it's all very subjective. While psychiatry picks us out of the crowd and says "Aha! There goes one now!", they really can't cure whatever is wrong, because they can't repair our damaged or missing genes that cause this problem. All they can do is provide chemical controls to limit its effects. Chemical restraints are still restraints, and cause their own trauma. But society accepts this as necessary for "the common good". They aren't worried about how I feel. They just want to achieve control, so I won't be a problem to them. They don't mind at all being a problem to me. But I understand that, and I'm compensated for it in other ways. I have skills and talents and abilities in degrees not experienced by those "normals". And I consider that more than a fair trade. I'm glad I'm not "normal". Normal is for sissies.

Today's Top Ten Countries ....

У меня нет много новостей. Я трачу слишком много времени на Facebook и президентских выборов. Президент Путин очень хорошо помнит свое обучение из КГБ. Как вы относитесь к этой новой дружбе с Соединенными Штатами?

I do not have a lot of news. I spend too much time on Facebook and presidential elections. President Putin remembers very well his training from the KGB. How do you feel about this new friendship with the United States?

Trump isn't even inaugurated yet and already.....

....Already, they're like two dogs, sniffing each other's butts in the parking lot.

This just in from China....

A picture really is worth a thousand words. Really. 

Universe? What Universe?

 Suppose this: Suppose there really was a "Big Bang" and that "Big Bang" was actually a Hydrogen Bomb in some alternate reality we can't access or see. Suppose that our expanding "Universe" is really that expanding cloud of radioactive materials and debris from that original blast. Suppose that our stars/suns/nuclei are now therefore in a state of radioactive decay, emitting various radiations including light & heat & other kinds of rays into space. Suppose that the mysterious "dark matter" everyone theorizes about is really made up of those materials from that blast which have already finished their radioactive decay and become stable materials, such as Uranium's decay to Lead-207. And suppose that our "Universe's" life-span of billions of years is only a matter of nanoseconds, or minutes, or perhaps hours in the time-frame of that alternate reality where this all began with that original "Big Bang"...... Just suppose..... Because.... The truth is often stranger than fiction.

Through a hole in the overcast, earlier today...

Today's "Top Ten" and a few thoughts of the day...

Мне любопытно, о том, несколько сотен из вас посетили мой блог. Я рада, что вы изучают английский язык, и я надеюсь, что вы также не узнать плохие привычки у нас есть. Вы должны стараться, чтобы оставить комментарий, нажав на это слово ниже каждой проводки. Я хотел бы знать, что вы думаете. То есть цель этого блога.

I'm curious about a few hundred of you for visiting my blog. I am glad that you are learning English, and I hope that you also do not learn bad habits we have. You should try to leave a comment by clicking on the word below each posting. I would like to know what you think. That is the purpose of this blog.

Moving along here, I have a Chinese neighbor whom I admire very much. She is a very smart and very hard-working "Tiger Mom" with two daughters now at or recently graduated from university. We were talking the other day about politics, and I very much wanted her opinion, because she was raised around Beijing. As the subject got to this recent American election, and its insanity, I asked her, "What do you think of all that?" She replied, "Even under a president like Trump, America has no problems like we do in China."

I am not so sure about that. If you read Trump's biography in Wikipedia, there are suggestions of connections with the mob while he was building those casinos which later went broke around Atlantic City, New Jersey.  And to digress for a moment, "Who has ever heard of a casino going bust? The mob and its casinos are what first established the famous city of Las Vegas. You'd have to be an idiot to go broke running a casino, unless the people who were backing you wanted to get you out of the picture!" ..... So we don't know for sure if Trump still has any connections to that mob or not. But the possibility is enough to cause worry.

Also, there's been reports that Trump's favorite bedside reading ( in case he reads a lot with a hot young wife like his ) consists of a book or books written by or about Adolf Hitler, and his famous speeches. This may be true, judging by a few of Trump's "Hitler salutes" at his rallies during the campaign. Also along that line, he has recently announced as his choices for at least three important positions as heads of civilian government departments, three former generals from the military. As Rachel Maddow points out in her news show on MSNBC, it is usually only dictators of banana republics that do things like that. In a system calling itself a democracy, they usually try very hard to keep the military out of civilian affairs, because they don't want it taking over the government like it recently did in Egypt.

And all of that, as a lady in the check-out line of my favorite supermarket said yesterday afternoon, while we talked about this as we waited our turns, "Scares the hell out of me, because it's too much like Hitler's beginnings in 1933 and later in the Dirty Thirties." I completely agree. And the frightening thing about all this is that very few of us who lived through those times are still alive to tell about it. The vast majority of today's know-it-all unwashed masses have no idea what "hell on earth" really looks like, smells like, or tastes like. And that's a shame, because it looks like ignorance is permitting history to repeat itself.

I had an unpleasant argument with a psychiatrist one time, because his diploma on the wall said that he had graduated from the University of Munich, perhaps better known as the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, and he had made a remark that he was just a small child during the Second World War, and he can remember crawling on his hands and knees through the gutter of the street while it was running red with blood from the results of a bombing raid that had just happened. (Horrible!) He also remarked that as a result of all that and other similar experiences, he had spent three years himself in a mental institution. 

At that moment, I was confronting him about addictive pills he had prescribed which were interfering with my abilities to operate the hydro-electric power station where I worked. I wasn't looking to be compassionate, but rather for an excuse to get away from that bastard's treatments. So rather harshly, I said, "Nobody who has spent three years in a Funny Farm is going to tinker with my brain, so you and your goddamned pills are history as of this moment!" That turned out to be a hasty and premature judgement, but that's another story.

My point, now that we get to it, is that civilization doesn't seem to have learned a damned thing from all those endless war films we see on TV or the Net, because we can't associate those with real life events. We don't imagine those Storm Troopers kicking in our door, pointing their guns at us, and perhaps shooting Grandpa in his rocker across the room. We don't imagine that famous "Primo Uomo" General Patton, and his tank corps roaring into the neighborhood and smashing or blowing up half the buildings in the neighborhood. We have never crawled to safety along a gutter running with blood, wondering how or if we would ever get out of Hell alive, like that long-ago shrink of mine. We have no idea what nameless Hell could be created by a reincarnated Adolf Hitler. And we do not want to find out. Why not?

Let me answer that with a quote from Will Rogers, one of my favorite people:- "You can't say civilizations don't advance. In every war, they kill you in a new way."

Please Copy....

Today's Top Ten...

Я продолжаю задаваться вопросом, почему так много русских посещают мой блог. Я бы очень хотел бы знать. Будет ли один из вас, пожалуйста, скажите мне? Вы также можете найти меня на Facebook.

A short history lesson....

This is a simulation of an ordinary Egyptian's personal household shrine from Ancient Egypt about 5,000 years ago. The Ankh in the center is the hieroglyph meaning "Life", and in those days, it was often shown in combination with the hieroglyphs for "Strength" ( a candle flame ) and "Health" ( a shepherd's crook ) in the common phrase "Life, Strength, Health" which was roughly equivalent to Commander Spock's famous Star Trek saying "Live Long and Prosper". 

And that's your "Egyptology 101" for this morning, Kiddies. Enjoy your day!

Short 'PS' ....
There are approximately 600 different hieroglyphs or 'pictographs' or 'ideograms' in the language of the Ancient Egyptians. Chinese is a similarly hieroglyphic or pictographically expressed language, but there are over 3,000 symbols, taking many years to fully learn. Amazingly, our English does it on less than three dozen, including punctuation. But - and this is a big 'but' - English doesn't have the means for the inflections and modifiers included in those others. So those others can be much more specific if done well by experts.

Top Ten

Сообщения о моей смерти сильно преувеличены.

My Season's Greetings.....